Friday, March 10, 2017

How to alienate your best friends

I find myself in the
unfamiliar situation of being in agreement with Winston Peters. The New Zealand First
leader thinks the police have lost the plot, and so do I.

Peters has attacked the
police for wanting to curtail the right of people to take their own wine and
beer to race meetings. He uses his customary blustering rhetoric, describing the
police as politically correct wowsers and comparing them with Nazis.

But he’s right when he says government
policy should recognise that the vast majority of New Zealanders treat alcohol
responsibly – a fact wilfully ignored by zealots in the police hierarchy, the
public health sector and the universities, who think we’re all helpless drunks.

Peters is also undoubtedly correct
when he predicts that a prohibition on people taking their own alcohol to race
meetings would soon become a blanket ban on alcohol at other community events,
and possibly even family picnics.

The latest police proposal
surfaced in a briefing paper on ways to reduce “alcohol-related harm” – three
words that I suspect the staff at Police Headquarters in Wellington are
required to chant for five minutes at the start of every working day to remind
them of their primary mission.

The briefing paper identified
BYO alcohol at race meetings as a “key issue”. This caused immediate alarm on
the West Coast, where the Kumara race meeting, at which people have
traditionally been allowed to drink their own alcohol, is a signature event on
the social calendar.

West Coast mayor Bruce Smith
says that if the police get their way, they will kill off an event that has
been attracting West Coast families for 134 years. And you can be sure the
Kumara races won’t be the only meeting affected.

I’ve often attended the races
at the picturesque Tauherenikau course, in the Wairarapa. It’s an old-style,
family-friendly country race meeting that attracts people from Wellington as
well from the Wairarapa.

As at Kumara, people are
allowed to take their own liquor. Many racegoers arrive early and set up picnic
tables under the trees, often in the same spot they’ve occupied for years. There are no bag searches or
other controls.

And you know what? In all the
years I’ve been attending the Tauherenikau races, I don’t think I’ve ever seen
anyone who was visibly drunk, still less behaving badly. The police are barely visible.

Yet the police hierarchy
claims to have identified race meetings as a “key” cause of alcohol-related
harm. This represents the latest step in a long campaign by police to redefine
themselves as moral custodians whose primary function is not so much to prevent
crime or catch crooks as to protect society from its own foolishness.

There have been innumerable
examples in recent years of this Mother Hen approach to policing. In
Wellington, police have subjected bar owners to such harassment that the city’s
most experienced and respected hospitality operator – a man whose bars and restaurants have an exemplary record – declared last year that bar owners now saw the
police as the opposition, not an ally.

Heavy-handed policing was
also blamed when the once spectacularly successful Wellington Rugby Sevens fell
out of favour with the public. It just wasn’t fun anymore.

It’s significant that Peters
has now taken hold of this issue. No politician has a keener nose for public
discontent, and his nostrils will be twitching more than ever in an election
year when his party stands a good chance of holding the balance of power.

He will have noted that the single-minded,
anti-liquor mindset adopted by the police hierarchy is putting officers offside
with the community they are paid to serve.

I picked up a sudden, unmistakeable
change of mood a couple of summers ago, when – without prompting from me – friends
began expressing their irritation about being breath-tested on their way to
work, or complaining about the bullying demeanour of police officers at outdoor
events where people were harmlessly (and legally) enjoying a drink.

I have also noted a growing
public feeling that police priorities are cockeyed and their resources misused.
Ninety per cent of burglaries go unsolved and victims of crime frequently complain
that calls to the police go unheeded.

A business owner told me last
week that even when he provided the police with video footage of organised
shoplifters at work, and evidence of their identity, no action was taken. Yet
the police always seem to have enough officers for alcohol checkpoints, even in
places and at times of day when the likelihood of catching drunk drivers must
be minimal.

If I’m hearing this, the
politicians must be hearing it too. Likewise, police officers in the community
must be aware of mounting dissatisfaction.

What should especially
concern the police and government is that the grumbling is coming not from the
usual habitual complainers, but from conservative, law-abiding people – the type
whose natural inclination is to respect and support the police. It takes a
special sort of incompetence – or perhaps I should say dogmatic zeal – to
alienate your best friends.

2 comments:

Good to see someone finally starting to write about these issues. The police are not a political party or a lobby group. There job is to enforce the law made by Parliament and their role, if any should be restricted to commenting on the practicalities of doing so. Over the top emotional crusading such as the "key issues" you refer to or using the, largely irrelevant, person who killed another with one punch as a witness at a licensing hearing should be seriously stomped on. I assume someone in the hierarchy is on a moral crusade -happens from time to time such as the Southland wowser who got promoted to Wellington some years ago and embarked on an anti-drink crusade.

About Me

I am a freelance journalist and columnist living in the Wairarapa region of New Zealand. In the presence of Greenies I like to boast that I walk to work each day - I've paced it out and it's about 15 metres. I write about all sorts of stuff: politics, the media, music, wine, films, cycling and anything else that piques my interest - even sport, though I admit I don't have the intuitive understanding of sport that most New Zealand males absorb as if by osmosis. I'm a former musician (bass and guitar) with a lifelong love of music that led me to write my book 'A Road Tour of American Song Titles: From Mendocino to Memphis', published by Bateman NZ in July 2016. I've been in journalism for more than 40 years and like many journalists I know a little bit about a lot of things and probably not enough about anything. I have never won any journalism awards.